Question

I plan to use my custom function below while getting from data from my mysql table & print it as html. Since htmlspecialchars() translate tags to html entities, I retranslate them ( p, br, strong) to tags.

My question is: Is it efficient enough or Is there any other shorter or more efficient way to achieve this aim? If you know any, can you please guide me with at least keywords? I can look fort he details in php.net and this site.

Thanks, regards

    function safe_output_from_mysql($safe_echo_to_html)
{
    $safe_echo_to_html = mb_convert_encoding($safe_echo_to_html, 'UTF-8', mb_detect_encoding($safe_echo_to_html));
    $safe_safe_echo_to_html = htmlspecialchars($safe_echo_to_html, ENT_QUOTES, "UTF-8");
    $safe_echo_to_html = preg_replace("&lt;br /&gt;","<br />",$safe_echo_to_html);
    $safe_echo_to_html = preg_replace("&lt;p&gt;","<p>",$safe_echo_to_html);
    $safe_echo_to_html = preg_replace("&lt;/p&gt;","</p>",$safe_echo_to_html);
    $safe_echo_to_html = preg_replace("&lt;strong&gt;","<strong>",$safe_echo_to_html);
    $safe_echo_to_html = preg_replace("&lt;/strong&gt;","</strong>",$safe_echo_to_html);
    return $safe_echo_to_html;
}

Answer 1

There is no need to call preg_replace() multiple times. You can use a single pattern to match all the desired tags:

preg_replace('/&lt;\s*(\/?(?:strong|p|br)\s*\/?)&gt;/i', '<\1>', $s);

I’m assuming, of course, that you’re actually planning to use regex to do the match. If the search strings are straight text, then strtr() is more efficient.